In this folder Mitrokhin specifically focuses on Alexander Ginsburg’s anti-Soviet activities in the 1970s. The note recounts that Ginsburg was a repeat offender for promoting opposition to the Soviet regime and the head of the Russian Social Fund and Solzhenitsyn Fund. His position allowed him to receive financial and material aid from different foreign institutions–something that was prohibited by Soviet law. Ginsburg had been supplying these funds to many organizations promoting anti-socialist propaganda (including Ukrainian nationalist clubs, Jewish extremists, and Orthodox activists). According to Mitrokhin, Ginsburg received 270,000 rubles of foreign aid in the 1970s.

Mitrokhin reports that the KGB believed that in 1976 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ordered Ginsburg to unite all anti-Soviet adherents to actively and publicly support the Helsinki Accords. He also had been passing on important information about major anti-Soviet activities held in the Soviet Union to American correspondents Thomas Kent, Alfred Short, and others.

As Mitrokhin reports, in 1979 the CIA exchanged Ginsburg for two Soviet spies. After the exchange, Alexander Ginzburg was tried, but was not convicted because all witnesses refused to give evidence.

Contains Vasili Rozanov’s brief personal observations of the first years of Lenin’s regime. Rozanov, Russian writer and philosopher, describes the creation of the early police agencies that emerged between 1917 and 1918. Among the first military and police institutions set up across Russian cities by Lenin’s Bolshevik government were the Military-Revolutionary Committee (Vojenno-revolutsyonnyj komitet, VRK) and the Union of People’s Commissioners (Sovet Narodnyh Komisarov, SNK). These agencies aimed to bring anti-Soviet newspapers and publications under government control. All bourgeois and Menshevik publications were to be shut down. On 20 December 1918, the SNK established a special commission entitled the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Vserossiyskaya chrezvychajnaya komissiya). The commission’s core function was to combat counterrevolution and sabotage. Mitrokhin quotes Rozanov as having written that every new recruit of the Extraordinary Commission had to “disavow one’s own will and be subordinate to duty alone.” Lenin’s policy was to achieve unconditional and unquestioning obedience so that no decision could be taken without directives from the Party.

According to Mitrokhin, Rozanov also indicates that in 1921 Lenin viewed freedom of speech as a political tool of bourgeois. In 1922, during the drafting of the Penal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Lenin advised Kurskiy, RSFSR Justice Commissioner (Narkom justisyj), to impose the highest degree of punishment for involvement in propaganda and agitation. Lenin sought to avoid the mistakes of the Paris Commune, which, he believed, had closed down bourgeois newspapers too late.

Written by Rozanov in 1919, this personal account begins with a literary introduction that depicts the first years of Lenin’s regime as an “iron curtain descending upon Russian History.”